With the acceleration of aging phenomenon, the number of patients suffering from chronic renal insufficiency among whom age of fifties or more than the same is more than 80% are increasing and the related market size is highly increasing by more than 10% every year.
Looking at the current situation of domestic and foreign related technologies for patients suffering from chronic renal insufficiency, there is a hemodialysis device (i.e., an artificial kidney). This is used to treat the patient suffering from chronic renal insufficiency, and the treatment is performed three times per week and every treatment takes four to five hours. For the treatment using the hemodialysis device, an arteriovenous fistula operation should be performed previously. This is an operation to enlarge a blood vessel by connecting the neighboring artery and vein because it is impossible to use ordinary blood vessels of a patient for inserting a big injection needle thereinto. By connecting a hemodialysis device to the enlarged vein after an arteriovenous fistula operation, hemodialysis is performed.
In addition, a portable artificial kidney which can be worn to the body of a patient is being developed. However this has an advantage over the above-described hemodialysis device in that this allows the domiciliary treatment, it has a poor treatment efficiency because of a portable device, and domestic and foreign researches for developing a device with high efficiency are being made.
Recently, an atmosphere that a new approach for an artificial kidney to overcome the limitation of the conventional artificial kidney is prevalent.